“I am the artistic director of the Met. I think people like to think I’m just a marketing person, but the fact is these artistic decisions, whether you like them or not, are coming from me. They’re not coming from any board members. I made it very clear when I was hired that I am making all artistic decisions here.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
If Banknotes Are The Measure, Arts Are Slipping In UK
As of July 1, there are no artists on current UK banknotes. But “there was a time in the early 1990s when the arts were represented on three of the four notes: Dickens on the £10, Shakespeare on the £20 and Wren on the £50. They were spared the ignominy of the fiver.”
A NY Concert Series For Music That’s Censored At Home
“These concerts are unusual in that the artists are not physically there — they join the show via an internet video call, and a band or musician they have collaborated with beforehand gives their music a proper performance. … If your government won’t let you play your music, a sympathetic band in the U.S. will step in.”
US Shuts Down Websites For Film, TV Piracy
“Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the ‘criminal theft of American movies and television.’ The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.”
In New Playwrights Festival, Cultivating New Black Voices
Katori “Hall, the author of that Broadway-bound play, ‘The Mountaintop,’ called this a time of renaissance for black playwrights, with more [of] their plays produced and acclaimed. ‘Still, there are new voices that need to be cultivated and supported,’ she said[.] ‘These mainstream theaters tend to latch on to one of us.'”
Parsing Wonder Woman’s New Look
“The makeover purges the Americana from her clothes. She no longer looks as though she’s wearing a flag. She has shrugged off parochialism to become an international sophisticate.”
Chatting With Norman Foster As He Turns 75
“‘There’s a snobbery at work in architecture,’ says Foster, speaking at his riverside studio in Battersea, London. ‘The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it’s an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.'”
Goodbye, Edward Elgar; Hello, Adam Smith
“The £20 English banknote featuring the image of composer Edward Elgar will be accepted in shops for the last time on Wednesday. … The Elgar £20 banknote, first issued in June 1999, has gradually been replaced by the Adam Smith note since March 2007.”
Lit By India’s Dalits (‘Untouchables’) Enters Mainstream
“Having long been confined to writing only in their own, local languages and largely ignored by the literary mainstream, Dalit authors are now being swooped on by some of the country’s biggest publishers, such as Radhakrishna Prakashan which is translating their work into Hindi, the lingua franca of northern India and beyond.”
Disaster Drama Takes The Stage — But How?
“We are familiar with storms in Shakespeare, and Ibsen was fond of a near-unstageable disaster direction or two – see ‘the avalanche buries him, filling the whole valley’ from Brand. But how do writers and directors stage a response to contemporary natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina?”